Tropic Sprockets

BY IAN BROCKWAY

KONK LIFE STAFF WRITER

Begin Again

Irish wunderkind John Carney scores another warm but existential hit that is a quasi followup to the beloved and very successful “Once.”

In this film, we are again inside the perilous environment of music and romance with cinematography appropriately muted in coffee tones. But this time, Carney trades in Dublin for New York City.

The compelling Mark Ruffalo is Dan Mulligan, an arrogant and volatile record producer who made his own company from the ground up. Dan is going through a bad spell: His behavior is increasingly aggressive and he can’t hold it together. He is fired and takes to a crummy apartment but it is more accurate to say Dan is homeless.

At a bohemian bar, Dan is startled out of his bourbon fugue by the striking raw qualities of the unstructured Greta (Keira Knightley) who coos and whispers in the tradition of a Norah Jones. Dan is like an addled Santa Claus, he’s so used to being morose that he can’t quite imagine what he hears, but he is awake. The song hits him like belladonna.

Dan is a Bacchus, struck by a formation of faraway suns. He tries to get the modest Greta to record a demo but she has no interest, thinking Dan a ne’er do well. In a way, that is what he is. Dan is persuasive enough to make Greta sleep on the concept and Dan is saved from a heartsick hovel at least for the time being.

The surprise of a new sound keeps Dan from despair, he is a kind of Clement Greenberg of the music world, seeing melody in terms of imagery and color.

There is a playful interlude where we see instruments coming to life that recalls Disney’s Fantasia segment, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”. Along with this vexation, Dan tries to smooth things over with his non-plussed self-absorbed daughter (Hailee Steinfeld) and a slightly damp alternative ex-wife (Catherine Keener).

As a kind of parallel to Jon Favreau’s hit film “Chef,” Dan has to convince others that he is worth it and strikes out on his own, encountering a medley of semi eccentric characters, including the feverishly tattooed and Minion-like CeeLo Green with a street angel’s voice.

Actor James Corden steals the show as the hyperactive and rambling Steve, a loyal friend of Greta’s who belts out his songs in a roaring voice. The core of this sonic morality tale however, lies with Mark Ruffalo who is a contradictory stew of emotions with the movement of knotty choices showing throughout his face.

At times he is a sorrowful bear, bothered and buzzed by his disappointments. At others, he is a mad imp, charmed and changed by the non polarizing thrum of a live band, garage made, ungrounded by pre-packaged effects. Anti-pop fans might well get a kick out of the handsome Adam Levine who plays Greta’s narcissistic boyfriend Dave, selling out by film’s end.

In one scene, Levine sports a huge bushy and black beard, perhaps as a tongue in cheek tribute to “Inside Llewyn Davis.” Although some aspects make for Carney’s usual stomping grounds, (this is, after all another underdog musician story), Carney weaves such innocence within his characters as they spin their high energy tunes, you can’t fail to miss its percussive feeling and may well spill a cymbal-full of tears.

“Begin Again” is a well crafted intimate valentine which almost creates an alternate world where the garishness of Autotune effects are unheard of and those bohemian musicians in cafés are still king. When you see the band Beatle-bound on a skyscraper roof, the water-works are sure to start. At such a point, it is deliriously easy to make the leap, believing against rationale that the MusicWorld has left the guitar, the cello and the drums untouched, to imagine that a Second Coming of a rattling and handmade music is somehow possible in the Mainstream and is sure to re-ascend soon.

And So It Goes

As fate would have it, this month marks the 25th anniversary of a little “’platform” sleeper with a Greenwich Village word of mouth that is now part of our kosher cinema history.

The film is “When Harry Met Sally.” It is well deserved. The film had a daring deceptively simple structure. This was a smallish neighborhood borough film about two quirky quasi-neurotic people phobic in romance but uniquely finding desire for each other in the process.

The film was cozy without being clunky with enough meaning and fun in its dialogue to actually speak about these characters (Billy Crystal’s Harry Burns and Meg Ryan’s Sally Bright) as real people with unique and anxiously-charmed wishes and apprehensions.

The film snuck up on most of us and established Rob Reiner (an already provocative director with Stand by Me) as a consistently thoughtful and respected artist.

Furthermore, “When Harry Met Sally” paved the way for a New York sensibility to arrive to TV through “Seinfeld,” a show whose long ago transmissions are still felt and seen today.

Now in 2014, here is “And So It Goes,” a film that might have had all of the best intentions and has been anticipated from every baby boomer from the five boroughs and beyond, hoping to give some visual Viagra to the quirky but poignant cosmopolitan Rom-Com genre that has made Reiner and director James L. Brooks famous.

The film is also written by Mark Andrus (As Good as It Gets). Oren Little (Michael Douglas) is a seersucker sourpuss realtor in Connecticut who stomps about in loafers. Oren is used to getting his way. When the camera moves on him, he is about to show his house for sale and is charmlessly insensitive if not outright rude to a black and hispanic couple.

No one really likes Oren but fellow peer Claire, (Frances Sternhagen) has a playful affection for him, given his veteran status. Oren mopes around his family cottage, Little Shangri-La and is a snarky nuisance. His chief annoyance is a meaty Rottweiler who enjoys pooping on his lawn. Enter the estranged and wet noodle son Luke (Scott Shepard), an insipid ex-addict who is somehow implicated in a financial scam, and about to go to the slammer.

Luke haphazardly (and inauthentically) hands off his daughter Sarah (a cute Sterling Jerins) to his grouch dad, even though they have zero contact. Leah, an empathetic widow and neighbor (Diane Keaton) falls for Sarah and reluctantly agrees to temporarily help Oren shoulder the load.

Leah is a mediocre singer at a cafe who ludicrously sobs at the drop of a fedora hat, waves her arms and wears silly Cyndi Lauper-type outfits for no particular reason. What follows are some milquetoast entanglements and tepid antics regarding Oren wanting to sell his house while being a good Grand and falling for the introspective but wild underneath, Leah.

A breezy romance is well and good, (goodness knows Reiner has earned his whimsical cred) but nothing much happens here. Oren sputters and mutters, rolling his eyes with a now trademark Michael Douglas smirk. Oren is a soft-shoe patina of the more evocative Jack Nicholson, James L Brooks-ish roles of the angry alpha man.

One scene with Sarah’s addicted mother plays as sappy melodrama with a buggy mom all but going thunk on the sidewalk when Sarah comes to the lower tenement apartment. Not one character (with the minor exception of Sarah) is fleshed out in a meaningful or real way.

Douglas is such an obvious blend of Nicholson and his own Gekko incarnation that he reads as a bland saltine figure. Keaton is a worldly but weepy widow who largely emotes onstage but none of it is very compelling as Keaton’s role also, too self consciously echoes other Brooks’ outings. Rob Reiner is reduced to an amorous patsy who has a pratfall in the mode of Laurel & Hardy.

This irrational silliness, combined with an unfunny baby delivery which feels dashed and inserted for quick smirks, doesn’t play very brightly. If “When Harry Met Sally” is a delicious pastrami at Katz’s Deli,  “And So It Goes” makes a  “meh” tempeh of pastoral comforts, sure to please only the most steadfast of urbanite Reiner fans.

Write Ian at [email protected]

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